Geography Reference
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outlined above. These form the essential building blocks around which evolutionary
accounts of regional economic dynamics have to be structured. Those accounts rest on a
population of competing entities of which at least some have unique characteristics that
lead to a dif erential allocation of resources that constrain behavior. The movement of
the system as a whole rel ects changes in the relative weights of the dif erent entities, the
birth of new competitors and elimination of existing ones, and processes of transforma-
tion that alter the characteristics of individual units. As we move to consider the evolu-
tion of the space economy, we must also examine the ways that selection environments
(spaces of competition) are produced and transformed by the actions of individual eco-
nomic agents, broader coalitions and institutions, and how the characteristics of those
spaces inl uence patterns of economic change.
Evolutionary approaches to economic dynamics have a number of potential points of
departure. The units of selection that ground an evolutionary account could be i rms,
workers, specii c technologies, competing modes of regulation, or the routines and insti-
tutions found in particular places. We have tended to choose the business establishment
(plant) as our basic unit of analysis and so privilege the economic dynamics that origi-
nate in plant-level competition. A consideration of evolutionary dynamics over space
raises the question of whether regions themselves might be considered as units of selec-
tion. We suggest that they should not, as this might suggest that regions act as homoge-
neous wholes which would represent another form of spatial fetishism. However, we do
accept the hierarchical view of evolution endorsed by a growing number of researchers
and believe that location inl uences the behavior and i tness of individual entities within
a region (Gould and Vrba, 1982; Gowdy, 1992; Hodgson, 2001; Levins and Lewontin,
1985; Lewontin, 1970; Vrba and Gould, 1986).
While not a unit of selection, perhaps it makes more sense to think of regions (at dif er-
ent scales) as forming selection environments within which and across which evolution-
ary processes operate. Individual businesses compete within one or more such selection
environments, facing dif erent pressures in each, and more or less able to modify those
environments either directly or indirectly. Regional characteristics, or the forms of spatial
selection environments, evolve through time, all shaped by local histories of political-
economic development and some inl uenced by the patterns and character of develop-
ment elsewhere. The same broad forces of competition that undergird the birth and death
of individual business units, the production and application of new technologies and
organizational forms, also create and destroy the political and economic environments
in which competition unfolds: technologies, institutions and the i rms and regions in
which they are embedded are ephemeral. Regions then are not simply passive containers
that bound the activities of political and economic agents, they represent ecologies that
are continually in l ux, the boundaries and forms of which are continuously contested.
And, as spatial and institutional environments change, the competitive pressures acting
on political-economic agents shift, inducing yet further rounds of search and innovation.
Evolutionary economic geographies must then focus on evolution in a region as well as
the evolution of regions. We develop these concepts through the arguments below.
Evolution in the region
We start our analysis of regional economic change by considering the evolution of a
population of plants that compete with one another within a common selection envi-
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